While it took decades for Top Gun: Maverick to materialize, all signs point to the next Top Gun installment having a much quicker route to movie theaters. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and Maverick screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie recently confirmed that an idea had been cracked for Top Gun 3. While this doesn’t mean production is imminent on the project, other positive comments from key Maverick participants like Glen Powell do indicate that a third Top Gun is gearing up to get off the tarmac.
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It’s obvious why Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, and other Top Gun: Maverick financiers would be eager to see another installment soar into theaters. After all, Maverick was a massive cultural phenomenon that made over $700 million domestically alone. However, Top Gun 3 is always doomed to live up to Maverick since the specific external circumstances informing that film won’t be around for this installment.
Maverick Was An Ode to The Past That Top Gun 3 Can’t Replicate
Top Gun: Maverick was an old-fashioned light-hearted summer blockbuster full of jets going zoom and dudes learning to embrace each other. However, it was also a tip of the hat to pivotal figures of late 20th-century American blockbuster filmmaking. For one thing, Maverick was dedicated to the late Tony Scott, the filmmaker responsible for the original Top Gun and countless other seminal blockbusters. The tragic loss of this figure has forever changed the world of action cinema. Returning to Maverick allowed for a celebration of the movie that launched Scott’s career.
In hindsight, Maverick was also a last hurrah for Val Kilmer, an integral cast member to the original Top Gun and so many additional motion pictures. Though he passed away three years after Maverick’s release, this massive box office hit was Kilmer’s last role. Returning to Top Gun not only allowed its producers to cash in on the 1986 film’s brand name – it also allowed Tom Cruise and company to celebrate icons deeply associated with the original Top Gun. Movies live forever. Flesh-and-blood people don’t. Maverick ultimately wrung surprising levels of pathos out of that reality.
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Without that element in play, what drives Top Gun 3? Frankly, at this juncture, it can’t help but look like just an attempt to print money after Maverick’s success. Audiences responded to Maverick because of its unexpected emotional vulnerability; it’ll be hard to mimic that again for Top Gun 3 since surprises are rarely as shocking the second go-around. But real-life mortality isn’t the only external element that Top Gun 3 won’t be able to tap into as easily as its predecessor.
Top Gun: Maverick Was A Major Moment For Movie Theaters
Top Gun: Maverick hit theaters 14 months after Godzilla vs. Kong’s late March 2021 debut indicated North American movie theaters were finally getting back to pre-March 2020 business. In those 14 months, titles like Venom: Let There Be Carnage and especially Spider-Man: No Way Home had made gobs of money. However, Top Gun: Maverick was a culmination of Tom Cruise’s one-man crusade to save movie theaters during COVID; he refused to unload the film on streaming, delaying its release for years until audiences could enjoy the full theatrical (and IMAX premium) experience. After so many years of uncertainty, Maverick delivered a dose of blockbuster theatrical spectacle that truly suggested movies were back. It also had the precise timing of being the first non-superhero movie blockbuster of the 2020s, making an extra special event for the wider moviegoing audience. Top Gun 3 is always going to come up short against those real-world circumstances that Maverick benefited from. For one thing, blockbuster theatrical movies are once again a cultural staple. Barbie, Oppenheimer, A Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch (and other films) have all become major box office hits.
Top Gun: Maverick was credited with “saving theaters.” With multiplexes no longer in need of saving, Top Gun 3’s purpose becomes foggier beyond just satisfying Paramount Pictures shareholders. Granted, if Maverick’s visual audacity is maintained for the threequel, at least Top Gun 3 can still impress the eyes with IMAX-ready spectacle. That might be enough for a summertime spectacle; however, marching on with Top Gun 3 innately ignores that Top Gun: Maverick benefited from external circumstances that don’t happen every day. Ignoring that could send Top Gun 3 crashing to the ground sooner, rather than later.
Top Gun: Maverick is now streaming on Paramount+.
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Image courtesy of Warner
